Old Stuff From Dead Companies
Today I was running a workshop on creating successful online marketing campaigns. By way of introducing myself, I talked through a couple of early campaigns in which I was involved. One was Flowers For Al and Don, and another was a silly little video I made, parodying an Apple ad that was popular at the time.
It’s funny to look at the page that hosted the video now. This was back in 2002, three years before the launch of YouTube. It was seriously painful to embed that Quicktime player correctly, and we worried that the movie files were too big for downloading at 12 MB. Click to see it full size:
I’m sure I wrote that page, so it’s funny to see the sub-heading “WebLogs and Crosslinks”. What can I tell you? It was 2002.
While searching for that movie, I discovered mirrored copies of website that my employer’s company operated: CapeClear.com and CapeScience.com. Neither URL works anymore, because Cape Clear was bought by a company called Workday in 2008.
Then it occurred to me that I might own the last copy of these sites, particularly CapeScience. Then I remembered the Internet Archive, and they’ve got some imperfect versions of the site from the early days.
Still, it’s odd to think that on my backup drive I have these all of these old assets of a 40-person company that doesn’t exist anymore. Why am I keeping them? Good question. I guess I’m a bit of digital pack rat.
Do you have old stuff from dead companies on your hard drive?
